36% of All Registered Steam Games Have Never Been Played

I’m a little guilty of admitting this, but I love buying games on sale. Who doesn’t? $2.49 for a copy of Riviera: The Promised Land for my PS Vita? Sure thing! $4.99 for Batman: Arkham Asylum or Skyrim? Sign me up! Oh look! Another Humble Bundle with a few games I’ve never owned! Why not?

This addiction has driven me to owning well over 300 games on my PC, and a large portion of them have not been played. Apparently, I’m not the only one either.

Ars Technica has a report that claims 36% of all registered games have never been played by the people who buy them. The report gathered data for about two months by gathering data from 90,000 profiles a day.

Ars also found out that Dota 2 is most frequently owned game on Steam with 25 million registered copies, and Team Fortress 2 follows second with 20 million. Half-Life 2: Lost Coast also is one of the most owned games on Steam, but of the 12.77 million who bought it, less than 2 million have played it. The same goes for Half-Life 2: Deathmatch in which 2.8 million users have played out of 11.02 million owners.

Ars has some other interesting stats on this report, including the most popular games in regards to hours played. Dota 2 and Team Fortress rank quite high up there, but unsurprisingly, Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source also carry a lot of weight for Steam.

Kind of eye opening when you think about it, but with sales and everything so cheap these days, it’s really easy to lose track of what you buy and what you play. I’ve tried to avoid Steam if possible these days mostly because I only really play indie games on my PC, and they are all becoming available on the Vita. Still, please be careful when making your Steam purchases. Humans aren’t made of money you know.